Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk responded to a review of the Model S that ran in the New York Times Feb. 8 with a blog post today that shows detailed logs of the New York Times reporter's journey in the all-electric car and accuses the reporter changing the facts.

Tesla claims the reporter falsified his account that the car ran out of battery power. And says he never "limped along at 45 mph" as he stated in the story. And that he intentionally let the battery run down, including doing donuts in a parking lot for half an hour and taking an unreported detour to Manhattan. Tesla also accuses the reporter of possessing "an outright disdain for electric cars."

Tesla said of reporter John Broder "When the facts didn’t suit his opinion, he simply changed the facts."

John Broder responded to Musk's accusations via twitter (prior to today's blog post by Tesla) that the account of the battery losing mileage overnight because of the cold was "fake." Broder, in his response, said the circumstances occurred as reported.

"When I parked the car for the night at a hotel, the range meter showed 90 miles remaining, and I was about 45 miles from the Milford Supercharger. As I recounted in the article, when I awoke the next morning the indicated range was 25 miles," Broder wrote.

Broder said he didn't top off the battery when he charged at one supercharger earlier in the trip because he wasn't aware of a "maximum range" setting that he would have needed to switch on that would have given him an additional 25 or 30 miles of range, he said.

"I was not directed by anyone at Tesla at any time to then switch to the Max Range setting and wait to top off the battery. If I had, I might have picked up an additional 25 or so miles of range, but that would have taken as long as 30 additional minutes," Broder wrote.

A lot has already been reported about this including a story I wrote before Tesla published its blog. My sense in reading the evidence is the story in the New York Times isn't fair. That important things were left out. And that the reporter could have used common sense to avoid such a dramatic end -- having to get the car towed -- to his story.

I have a hard time believing the reporter set out to be malicious or that he wanted the car to fail. A little more common sense - charge the car overnight! - might have avoided this whole thing.

It's still unclear to me why Tesla spent so much time and energy trying to disprove this report. The Tesla Model S won the car of the year. The overwhelming majority of information written about the car is positive. All Tesla's done through this lengthy response is called more attention to the alleged problems the article reported.

Lastly, I'd encourage Tesla to release the entirety of the logs. The snapshots and graphs used in Tesla's blog post tell one part of the story, but not the whole story.

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